2018-03-17

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone. Your humble blogger is currently in an exciting and undisclosed location celebrating this holiest of occasions by embracing two modern traditions that would be totally alien to both St. Patrick and a devotee of his a mere century ago.

The second tradition is wearing orange in addition to (or even instead of) green. As astute readers of this blog may have noticed, I'm not Catholic. On top of that, not only do I support keeping Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but I think the Republic of Ireland was a mistake in the first place and the UK should have been the totality of both isles. As a result, it's only fitting that I support the orange third of the Irish flag. (I'll probably drink a Black and Tan as well, just to be cheeky). As Pulpit and Pen puts it (profoundly):

First, Patrick wasn’t Irish. Patrick was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, where he was raised to the age of 16. Secondly, Patrick wasn’t Catholic. Patrick’s father was a deacon and his grandfather a pastor in the very early Christian Church of Britain, which had no affiliation whatsoever to the Bishop of Rome.

Put plainly, any attempt to Catholicize Patrick by the church of Rome is pure fiction, made up by the Harlot Beast herself.

In Ireland, Roman Catholics wear green. But Protestants, however, wear Orange (in honor of William of Orange, the great Protestant king). So when you go to that St. Paddy’s day celebration, wear orange and explain to people why; it’s a good opportunity to share the Gospel.

In the song, he covers a little bit of Irish whiskey drinking. When I was in Ireland a few years back I made sure to start up a round of this song at the bar: there were enough other Albertans around that we could make a solid go at singing it. The key lyrics are:

Well I've heard it said that you can get some heat in Irish pubs
Servin' Jamesons to an Orangeman and Bushmills to his cuz
Well here's what you do with Tullamore Dew, you can meet 'em both halfway
It's time to switch to whiskey they've been drinkin' beer all day

For those of you unfamiliar, Bushmills is distilled in Northern Ireland where the Orangemen are, and Dublin is certainly not a friendly place for Irish Loyalists!

However, this lyric bothered me more than a little bit. Having explored Ireland I learned that the song is ridiculously inaccurate...it may explain some of the weird looks they were giving me at that tavern in Dublin (not far, of course, from the Jameson Distillery). A few days later I visited (as you might) the Tullamore D.E.W. Visitor Centre, a leisurely half day drive almost due west of Dublin. The key note here is that Tullamore is smack dab in the middle of The Republic of Ireland (almost literally) but is no closer to the 13 provinces of Northern Ireland than the republican capital is. Both in a geographical sense as you can see in the map below) but also culturally.

The worst thing is that the Tullamore Dew distillery seen in the photo is a historic building dating back to...2014. The original Tullamore Dew ran from 1829 until 1954, after which production moved to County Cork in the far southest of the country and about as far from Northern Ireland as you can be without drowning. While founded by Michael Molloy, the real father of the distillery was one Daniel E. Williams. Williams was born in the Quaker (ie. Protestant) down of Mountmellick but he himself was Catholic. So we have a Catholic "greenie" making a whiskey with a green label that for the last 50 years was produced in the heart of the greenest part of Ireland...and that's "halfway"?

In fairness, Jameson was founded in Dublin but is no longer distilled there...it is instead distilled...in Cork...next door to where Tullamore Dew was made from 1954-2013. So in fairness new Tullamore is closer to halfway to Bushmills compared to the new Jameson distillery, but that only works if you listen to the song now (Corb Lund released it in 2002).

The main thrust of the CBC story by "investigative reporter" Geoff Leo is regarding Red Indians jacking up the leasing fees (before the lease expiration) in order to either generate more revenue or drive the renters away and leave behind their infrastructure improvements. It's a really really shitty story, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.

As an en passant in the story it talks about how the Indian Reservation at Crooked Lake (no, srsly!) recently had an election fight over who would be Big Chief No Fart. The winner was a disgusting piece of shit named Lynn Acoose who was behind this dickhead move. She beat a much more moderate candidate named...oh, wait, sorry, I'm being told over my earbud that in fact she was the moderate candidate. She beat an even more batshit insane Red Indian named Lyle Acoose†.

This was apparently an election issue, and Lyle Acoose had something to say about it.

One of her competitors, Lyle Acoose, argued the leases should be ended outright.

He raised concerns about the fact the cottages are mostly occupied by "moonias," a Plains Cree term for white people.

"We had a settlement down there; now it's all moonias down there," Lyle Acoose said in an August 2017 election speech in Regina.

McScuze me? So this candidate was letting loose with racial slurs on the campaign trail and it's just a bit of local colour to deal with the outraged tenant issue as far as the CBC is concerned. At no point was "racial slur" or "racist comment" used in this story. You may notice that "moonias" is often repeated in the CBC story.

Lance Sparks, who is African-Nova Scotian, was dropping off supplies at the school Thursday night when a parent pointed out the slur, n----r, on the hood of his car in what appeared to be purple marker or lipstick.

So when the racial slur is against a black guy [or at least a one quarter black guy to look at him... -ed] the CBC will edit the word out of their story and even censor it in the picture. However, when the racial slur is against whites who have dared to make a Red Indian community better, CBC prints it multiple times.

†. You might notice that the two choices were apparently Lynn Acoose and Lyle Acoose. For all the fears about George W. Bush's brother and William Jefferson Clinton's fake wife being the two choices Americans could have faced in 2016, that doesn't compare to which flavour of incompetent Acoose the Crooked Lake Indian Reserve apparently gets to chooce from. Regular readers of this site may recall that previously we uncovered another Red Indian family that was defrauding white taxpayers as some sort of grim family bonding exercise. At least the Twin Acooses here are just thieves, while the Mitsuing clan in Loon Lake made it rich while little boys burned to death due to their corruption.

Mark Steyn posted a photo of the craven establishment, and while his article concentrated on the loss of heritage suffered by losing our connections with the past, I noticed a subtle difference between the Google Maps screenshot at the top of this post and the file photo at the top of his.

That's right, this place that panders to the eternal outrage of a primitive child race has no problem insulting normal and moral people by putting up the faggot flag and endorsing people who have made a fundamentally evil lifestyle choice.

In the meantime, call the poofter-loving Injun apologist out on his dumb decision. No, literally.

2017-12-26

As I write this I just got home from a family event in a medium sized Alberta city. Driving with other family members I figured it would be good to listen to some Christmas music, so I turned the radio to 92.5 Power Fresh 92, which has been incessantly playing Christmas music since December 1st.

So of course they don't play Christmas music anymore...as of today, they switched back to soft rock. This is patently ridiculous. I'm not the only person in my circle of friends who had family dinners today as well as yesterday, and whether background music or to put people in the mood on the drive over, terrestrial radio yet again fell flat. And for no perfectly good reason.

My mistake. I'd just been on the phone to an editor in London who'd wanted early copy for the late January issue because no-one was going to be in the office "over Christmas". I'd forgotten that, in New Hampshire, "over Christmas" means December 25th. In London and much of the rest of Europe, it's a term of art stretching as far into mid-January as you can get away with.

In Canada though, December 26th is a holiday and a well celebrated one. So it's really a shame that a radio station interested in playing Christmas music almost four weeks before Christmas can't play it the day after.

2017-11-26

Live from the city of Ottawa Ontario (which lazy broadcasters refuse to ever say, going with the hackney and cliched and makes-you-hate-the-city-even-more term "nation's capital") tonight is the 105th Grey Cup, and the end of the Grey Cup's lengthy eastern road trip.

Next year the big game returns to Edmonton...it should have been our turn this year but the Canada150 celebrations mandated a game in Ottawa instead. Of course, the Esksimos should have playing in the game but you're already sick of Eskimos fans complaining about this. Instead we have the despicable Calgary Stampeders playing against the detestable Argonauts of Toronto the most evil city in the world that deserves to be destroyed by nuclear weapons. Oh yeah, and a squaw lady playing the halftime show.

I guess if I need to cheer on anybody in this game it needs to be Ricky Ray: it's rumoured the former Eskimo will retire after this season if he leads Toronto to a Grey Cup. And because the only thing worse than the Stampeders playing a Grey Cup game in Edmonton is having them do it as the reigning champions.

2017-11-21

As I write this the Oilers are losing 7-2 to St. Louis. If this score holds it will be the second Blues win in a week against Edmonton, and the Oilers third consecutive loss. As a result, the Oilers will have 16 points in 21 games, and be on-pace for a 62 point season. Three times over this past decade the Oilers have finished with exactly 62 points (their lowest ever in a full season), so why not a fourth?

Don't forget too that the ArizonaPhoenix Coyotes beat Toronto last night and the NHL's worst team now sits with 13 points. The Vancouver Canucks (no, seriously!) are holding onto the last wildcard spot with 23 points, meaning the Oilers are twice as far away from a wildcard spot as they are from being the worst team in the league. Yes, last season and the playoff run were fun, but it looks like it will be a once-in-a-lifetime aberration.

So it's time now to do what Oilers fans traditionally do in mid-to-late November...start fantasizing about getting a #1 overall draft pick who will completely turn the team around.† Also part of the tradition is coming up with a slogan to chant as the Oilers continue to fall to the bottom.

† It's worth noting that the infamous Oilers H.O.P.E. line (Hall, Omark, Paajarvi, Eberle) has now officially and entirely been given/traded away

Svechnikov is an awfully long name to try and chant. "Be sov(ft) for Svechnikov?" Tonight I could accept "Lose to the Blues for Hughes" as a decent chant. "Disdain for McBain" seems to be stretching it. However you'll notice I deliberately skipped number one. Why? Simple: he's the best and most obvious choice.

So let's do it Oilers fans. Let's start practicing now, we'll have lots of chances to use it if the season continues like this:

So already there is some common ground between the two sides who usually disagree on everything. However, there is lots of common ground available, isn't there? There are lots of lessons we had learned on November 9th, and we all agree what they are. It's heartwarming, it's comforting, and it's inspirational.

Unfortunately, it's all totally bogus. Here are six things that aren't true about last year's election that both the right and the left have fallen for.

#6 - Undecideds won Trump the election: This comes up in every election in every country, and it never holds any water. Please stop, take a deep breath. Cosmopolitan very very very thinly disguised their contempt for non-voters, essentially accusing them of putting Trump in the White House. It doesn't matter, frankly, what the percentage of eligible voters who didn't vote was: they didn't cast a vote, and you can't assume that if you strong-armed all of them into a polling booth that they would pull the level you wanted them to pull. Maybe every one of them would have chosen Hillary and put her in the White House. Or maybe every one of them would have picked The Donald and he would have swept the entire country. After all, Trump did well with undecided voters in the third debate, but poorly in the first debate. The ultimate answer is that you don't know how they would have voted. In fact, they may not know either. They don't count, they never count. Never count voters who didn't vote.

#5 - The results are a major cultural shift: Remember what I said above? Ignore it. Now we need to count the undecided voters who didn't vote. As a percentage of the general population, in 2016 the Republican candidate won 26.07% of the potential votes. In 2012 the Republican candidate won 27.83% of the popular vote, and in 2008 the Republican candidate won 26.58% of the popular vote. Conversely, the Democratic candidate in 2008 won 30.82% of the popular vote, in 2012 the Democratic candidate won 30.1% of the popular vote, and in 2016 won 26.36% of the popular vote. Now look at this on a graph:

If anything, looking all the way back to 1992, it appears the Democrats have a pretty solid line of support (a slight blip in 2008) with Republicans getting their voters out with a much less consistent rate of production. But there's no real cultural shifts going on here: the tiniest change in the number of vote % can make a wild difference. Look at the Electoral College totals which I included for each party above the graph. The difference between the Democrats in 2004 and 2008 is striking: their seats in the Electoral College increased 45% (from 251 to 365)...by increasing their share of the national vote by 12% (and in real terms only by 3.3%). For those objecting to the Electoral College, that isn't uncommon. The Conservative Party of Canada won 99 seats with 32% of the ballots cast in 2015 while the Liberal Party won 184 seats with 39% of the popular vote...meaning each 1% of vote gained one party 4.71 seats versus 3.09 seats for another. That's just how it goes. -ed]

...hey, did you ever watch that "House of Cards" show? Doesn't it open up with that faggot Kevin Spacey choking a dog to death? Isn't he the hero of the show, and also a Democrat? Isn't that worse than 2/3rds of what Trump is alleged to have done and probably worse than anything he actually has done? I have no point here (there is a point to the actions of real-Spacey vs Trump), just an open question...

...

...are you ready?...

58%.

That's right. Donald Trump's share of the white vote is slightly less than Mitt Romney in 2012. Some of that is the Utah Mormons supporting Evan McMullin, and some will be going to Gary Johnson tripling his vote share from four years ago. Still, whites voted for the chap with (R) next to his name at a pretty consistent rate from election to election.

#3 - Women voted for Hillary: Similar to the bit about whites, Hillary did well with women, garnishing 54% of the female vote. She certainly can lord that over her predecessor who won in 2012 with...55% of the female vote. Which itself was a dropoff from 2008, where he had support from 56% of women voters. You can't even attribute any of this to Jill Stein: like Gary Johnson, she tripled her share of the national vote from 2012...however the sheer numbers are too small to make a difference. She went from 0.36% to 0.98%.

#2 - Blacks and other minorities voted against Trump: I put all of these as separate issues just to pad the numbers, frankly. It's all the exact same phenomenon. "Hateful racist" Trump received 8% of the black vote. Loving and inclusive Mitt Romney received less of the black vote share than Trump did, getting only 6%. In 2008, McCain received only 4%. In other words, Trump received the highest proportion of black votes for a Republican Presidential nominee since 2004, and almost the same share as in 2000. Trump received 29% of the asian vote, lower than McCain received in 2008 but higher than Romney received in 2012. Trump received 37% of the "other" racial votes, Romney received 38% and McCain only received 31%.

Finally, we come to Hispanics. Trump was infamously going to collapse with Hispanic voters and that alone would cost him the election, pollsters assured us. His comments on Mexican rapists and an end to illegal immigration across the southern border poisoned any possible relationship with American's hispanic population and doomed his candidacy. Now first you have to remember that 2000 & 2004 were huge outliers for the Republicans. George W. Bush (pbuh) was legendary in his relationship with Hispanic voters. In 2004, 44% of them supported him for President and was a major factor in securing his dominant win over John Kerry. In 1996 Dole only received 21% of the Hispanic vote, and in 2008 John McCain received 31%. 2012 saw Mitt Romney's share fall to 27%, shedding three-quarters of the 2004 gains over 1996. Trump again saw an increase of Hispanic voters versus Romney. Not 'yuge' by any means, but 29% of Hispanics (including 33% of Latino men) put a vote down for the guy with (R) next to his name, even though with the exception of "really large wall" his immigration policies were basically identical to the guy who got 27%. In other words, Hispanics voted for Trump at about the same level as they have been since spillover from a President highly regarded by Hispanics.

#1 - Polls are important and the pollsters got it all wrong: Those lying biased pollsters have upset literally everybody. Before the election, Trump supporters took to the internet to claim that organizations running the polls and the media reporting the both are both so biased towards Hillary that you couldn't take any of their claims at face value. Trump, they said, was going to win, and win big, and if the pollsters didn't agree they were lying to you. After the election, it's the left irate at these pollsters. Hillary supporters were under the impression that she had a strong lead going into the polls, and therefore weren't as motivated to get out and vote, thinking their girl had it all sewn up. The Guardian reports that the Democrats didn't devote much money to Wisconsin and Michigan because polls told them their lead was secure. However, the polls said Hillary would win and instead Trump won. I mean, the numbers don't lie, do they? You promise X and when X doesn't happen, you were wrong. What could be more obvious than that?

I suppose the better question is why are you believing polls in the first place? The old adage that the only poll that matters is held on election day carries a lot of weight, frankly. Much like how we never cared about movie box office receipts back in the day, we never used to rely so heavily on polls before either. It's mostly a function of an endless media cycle and our willingness to boil anything complicated down to a simple "who's winning" question. Polls are almost like watching a game, and keeping your eye on the score. It's important, I suppose: at the end of the game, the score is the most important thing. As it goes on, the score can help you understand a lot of what's going on...the question of "why are they bunting" or "why are they playing a neutral zone trap" is often answered by looking at the score. Similarly, polls could have helped you understand why Clinton had been going on about Muslims for the last three days of the campaign (a new poll had showed Trump's support among Muslims was increasing)†.

But that's in a case where all you care about is whether your side is winning or losing. In sports, that's most of us. But what if you're a professional scout looking at a junior or minor league team? Should our team sign that hot young prospect? If you're an NBA scout who gets asked that question, and your answer is "his team won the game 102-98" you are probably going to be fired within twelve minutes. Who cares? Did this hot young prospect even play in the game? If he did, what was his PER? And how did he look? Did you see things in his game that made you confident when he went up to the next higher levels that he would succeed? Does he have the specific qualities that the team is looking for? Does his nature and personality mean he would be a good fit in your locker room? You can see how for a person wanting to evaluate two candidates these analogies are far more applicable than score-watching. I suppose you could say it's a factor in how polarized we've all become...but then remember that graph about how few voting age Americans actually move their vote from election to election. The undecideds tend to decide all of these races by relatively narrow margins, and therefore how the media covers a campaign and what information the electorate is exposed to are major factors into how that election plays. As a result, poll watching is completely useless to the small sliver of the voting-aged public who will ultimately need to decide what the candidates are all about and decide the actual election.

† This is just an example.

Now understanding that the polls shouldn't be important, they were still wrong. Here's The Guardian again:

But analysts such as Silver, a man dubbed an oracle, a soothsayer and a savant have an interest in continuing to share these predictions. Where would the man’s career be if he simply replied “don’t know” when asked what Americans would do? It’s not just FiveThirtyEight. The New York Times also got it wrong, along with Reuters, NBC news and countless others. Just about everyone did – because they couldn’t resist the temptation to try to guess human behaviour.

Our forecast has Clinton winning the national popular vote by 3.6 percentage points, which is similar to her lead in recent national polls. Her chances of winning the popular vote are 81 percent, according to our forecast.

‡ Whenever somebody wants to show you an average, you really need to look at two pieces of information. The average itself, and the standard deviation. In a way, that's what the above analysis of white/female/minority voters was. Sure Trump only got 8% of the black vote, but when you consider his range was basically 4-11%, it puts the numbers into better perspective. If you really want to be a pro at this, when you receive an average ask what kind of average it is as well.

So "the pollsters" didn't necessarily get it wrong. They didn't fail to predict that whites would "vote for Trump in droves" because they didn't, anymore than Hispanics rallied the vote to "stop Trump" anymore than you could have stopped Trump by forcing undecideds into a polling station. They're all myths about the 2016 Presidential Election.